Household Papers and StoriesStowe, Harriet Beecher
General
Household Papers and Stories
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Didactic fiction; Home economics -- Fiction; Short stories
have been trained from childhood in the school of verities,--who
have been lectured for even the shadow of a prevarication, and shut
up in disgrace for a lie, till truth becomes a habit of their
souls,--it is very difficult for people so educated to understand how
to get on with those who never speak the truth except by mere
accident, who assert any and every thing that comes into their heads
with all the assurance and all the energy of perfect verity.
"What becomes of this girl? She finds means, by begging, borrowing,
living out, to keep herself extremely trim and airy for a certain
length of time, till the rats and waterfalls, the lace hat and
parasol, and the glib tongue, have done their work in making a fool of
some honest young mechanic who earns three dollars a day. She marries
him with no higher object than to have somebody to earn money for her
to spend. And what comes of such marriages?
"That is one ending of her career; the other is on the street, in
haunts of vice, in prison, in drunkenness, and death.
"Whence come these girls? They are as numerous as yellow butterflies
in autumn; they flutter up to cities from the country; they grow up
from mothers who ran the same sort of career before them; and the
reason why in the end they fall out of all reputable employment and
starve on poor wages is, that they become physically, mentally, and
morally incapable of rendering any service which society will think
worth paying for."
"I remember," said I, "that the head of the most celebrated
dressmaking establishment in New York, in reply to the appeals of the
needlewomen of the city for sympathy and wages, came out with
published statements to this effect: that the difficulty lay, not in
unwillingness of employers to pay what work was worth, but in finding
any work worth paying for; that she had many applicants, but among
them few who could be of real use to her; that she, in common with
everybody in this country who has any kind of serious responsibilities
to carry, was continually embarrassed for want of skilled work-people
who could take and go on with the labor of her various departments
without her constant supervision; that, out of a hundred girls, there
would not be more than five to whom she could give a dress to be made
and dismiss it from her mind as something certain to be properly
done.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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